Feasibility of communication planning in Airborne Networks using mission information

The Department of Defense (DoD) is making strides toward Network Centric Warfare. In modern warfare, information superiority and situational awareness is vital to superiority on the battlefield. That is, whoever can pass relevant information between war fighters in a more timely and efficient manner is more likely to succeed. Therefore, the concept of communication planning for DoD missions should become as critical as mission planning itself. Over the years there has been significant research in many areas of mission planning, and most DoD missions are executed in a planned manner. The authors of this paper have in the past independently argued that the availability of mission plans can greatly improve communication planning. For this paper, we team up and closely examine how mission plans can be made available for efficient communication planning from a logistics point of view. In particular, we use the domain of the military Airborne Network (AN) as an example. We consider various degrees of mission information available in different AN missions and present case studies using simulation on the kind of communication planning possible with the given information.